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Sunday, January 10, 2010

KL 10th Wedding Expo 2010

It was quite an eventful Saturday afternoon, I gathered with two fellow Olympus freaks at Mid Valley Exhibition Hall for a fashion show organized especially for the KL 10th Wedding Expo. Fishee and Frederick made it all the way from Malacca to KL during this particular weekend, and it was quite coincidental for the fashion show to happen at Mid Valley since we had errands to run there, stopping by at that exact time.

I am very fond of the Wedding Expo fashion shows. My first time shooting a fashion show was during one of the Expo in 2008, which was also held at Mid Valley, featuring Amber Chia. From my previous encounter, the fashion show was very well presented, the models hired for the show were superb, not only with good looks but they know what they were doing on stage, doing the proper catwalk and appropriate posing. The stage coordination has been fantastic, hence I was having high expectations from the Wedding Expo fashion shows. However, this time we have the Ford Supermodel winner representing Malaysia, Kelly Jagan as the main attraction. She was starring at the fashion show in the afternoon, and rushed off to the coming world competition in Brazil at the very same evening.

According to the published schedule in their official website, the show was supposed to commence at 2.30pm. Fred, Fishee and I were already positioning ourselves at the front of the runway stage nearly an hour before the show started. Yes, we were fanatics. It was not entirely waiting for nothing, we had some really cool band performance by Rhumba and also live bagpipe and Scottish music presentations happening prior to the fashion show. We, the usual hunters of free public events know the fact very well that early birds gets the best picks of worms. Some people may thing it was a waste of one hour waiting for the show to start, but to us it was essential to secure the best shooting location, and the shots we obtained from where we were standing was very worth the wait.

I have been consistently pursuing the similar objective in my fashion show outings lately, and the aim has been the same. I wanted to capture the photos of the models as they walked along the runway, and very importantly, staring right into the camera while doing their prominent catwalk. I do not know why but these kind of shots appeal very much to me, somehow there is the fashion magazine quality feel to it. Obviously, eye contact is very important. Your models will come more alive, and engaging the viewers in a more intimate way can be achieved if the eyes were looking straight to you. The catwalk is what defines a true fashion show, not tee stop and pose routine, and how glamorous the entire show turned out heavily depended on the flow of the catwalk itself. Keeping this in mind, I tried my very best to capture the catwalk.

The following are the challenges I was facing while shooting this session:

1) Inconsistent Stage Lighting. Unfortunately, the stage lighting was rather poor this time. Firstly, the coverage was not even, and certain parts of the stage was brighter than others, casting very uneven shadows and highlights on the models. Secondly, the color rendering of the strong spotlighting did not help in keeping the skin tone of the models faithful. There were strong green and red lights that I dare say, destroyed the look of the models.

2) Fast Catwalk. As much as I wanted to capture the catwalk, I must admit it was not an easy talk. I was equipped with a dinosaur lens, the first generation Olympus tele lens which was already more than 5 years old. The technology, was obviously outdated, and the focusing speed was extremely slow. The lens did not manage to catch up with the catwalk of the models in a few occasions, but persistent trials somehow managed quite a number of usable shots, as presented in this entry.

3) Shooting from bottom up. For some weird reasons, these days the photographer's stage is no longer provided to the public. Hence we were standing at the ground level, while looking up at the models standing and walking on the elevated platform, which was relatively higher from the ground. Shooting from lower angle did not produce flattering perspectives, particularly shots on facial profiles.

The highlight of the whole show was none other than Kelly Jagan, the winner of Ford Supermodel Search Malaysia. She had quite a lengthy stage time, which was generous enough for all the photographers to snap as many photographs of her as we all wanted. Somehow the lighting did not do justice to her skin tone, and the glow was just not there. Nonetheless, she looked surprisingly stunning in all the apparels assigned to her, and she presented her catwalk and executed her poses flawlessly. She indeed, has the qualities to be a supermodel.

Kelly Lagan

So yeah, there you go, one of the regular dosage of hot chicks, captured and displayed for all you lovely readers out there.